Adam Bede eBook

vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies
all bring with them the consciousness that they are
mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of
love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment
passes from expression into silence, our love at its
highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself
in the sense of divine mystery. And this blessed
gift of venerating love has been given to too many
humble craftsmen since the world began for us to feel
any surprise that it should have existed in the soul
of a Methodist carpenter half a century ago, while
there was yet a lingering after-glow from the time
when Wesley and his fellow-labourer fed on the hips
and haws of the Cornwall hedges, after exhausting limbs
and lungs in carrying a divine message to the poor.

That afterglow has long faded away; and the picture
we are apt to make of Methodism in our imagination
is not an amphitheatre of green hills, or the deep
shade of broad-leaved sycamores, where a crowd of rough
men and weary-hearted women drank in a faith which
was a rudimentary culture, which linked their thoughts
with the past, lifted their imagination above the
sordid details of their own narrow lives, and suffused
their souls with the sense of a pitying, loving, infinite
Presence, sweet as summer to the houseless needy.
It is too possible that to some of my readers Methodism
may mean nothing more than low-pitched gables up dingy
streets, sleek grocers, sponging preachers, and hypocritical
jargon—­elements which are regarded as an
exhaustive analysis of Methodism in many fashionable
quarters.

That would be a pity; for I cannot pretend that Seth
and Dinah were anything else than Methodists—­not
indeed of that modern type which reads quarterly reviews
and attends in chapels with pillared porticoes, but
of a very old-fashioned kind. They believed in
present miracles, in instantaneous conversions, in
revelations by dreams and visions; they drew lots,
and sought for Divine guidance by opening the Bible
at hazard; having a literal way of interpreting the
Scriptures, which is not at all sanctioned by approved
commentators; and it is impossible for me to represent
their diction as correct, or their instruction as
liberal. Still—­if I have read religious
history aright—­faith, hope, and charity
have not always been found in a direct ratio with a
sensibility to the three concords, and it is possible—­thank
Heaven!—­to have very erroneous theories
and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which
clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that
she may carry it to her neighbour’s child to
“stop the fits,” may be a piteously inefficacious
remedy; but the generous stirring of neighbourly kindness
that prompted the deed has a beneficent radiation that
is not lost.

Considering these things, we can hardly think Dinah
and Seth beneath our sympathy, accustomed as we may
be to weep over the loftier sorrows of heroines in
satin boots and crinoline, and of heroes riding fiery
horses, themselves ridden by still more fiery passions.